Typically, mobile communication systems are cellular systems, i.e. a coverage area of a mobile communication network is made up of cells, the coverage area of each cell being covered by one base transceiver station and the cells usually slightly overlapping with surrounding cells. Network operators control a mobile communication system by means of one or more network management systems (NMS). Each cell in a cellular network should be identified individually in order for the NMS to be able to control and monitor the mobile communication network in order to enable cell-specific services of the mobile communication systems to be provided and in order to enable mobile devices to check whether or not they have user rights to the services. Cellular network operators maintain a database of information about the transmitting elements in their network. Information stored in such database may come from variety of sources, including various intelligent network planning tools. The database may contain information on network traffic, component locations, and component connectivity.
Previous studies across a variety of operators have shown that the planning data, while roughly correct, will typically have a significant number of errors. Measuring accurately a time-delay for the uplink and downlink data often proves to be difficult. In addition, site acquisition difficulties, network maintenance, tool migration and acquisitions can all cause variance between the plan and the actual installation. In practice, tests in various markets have shown between tens and hundreds of meaningful errors per market.
Detecting these errors is normally very time consuming and requires performance of numerous verification tests to assure the accuracy of the planning data. Accordingly, there is a need for an improved method of network table error detection.